Ignorance from Princeton.

Slashdot mentioned a column in Syllabus magazine entitled The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet. Attempting to be a commentary on Free Software, its really an ignorant ramble more likely to be written by a usenet crank on a trolling binge than an employee of Princeton University in an IT magazine for academia.

So pissed off I was by this bit of near libel:

These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.

that I actually sat down and wrote a letter to the editor. Here it is (a bit mangled by <ECODE>).

Hello. My name is Michael G Schwern and I'm writing to you as the editorof Syllabus to express my disappointment that "The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex,No Effort Diet" was published in November 2003's issue of Syllabus. As amagazine about IT issues in academia, I would have expected better editorialcontrol and I would expect better of Princeton University.

Howard's column is an uninformed, free-associating rant against FreeSoftware the likes of which I would expect to see in a Usenet troll postedby one of the "teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, viruscreators" he tries to link Free Software developers to, not in a serious ITmagazine. I'm appalled Howard produced this article, which reduces itselfto base name-calling, after writing his more intriguing "Reflections" columns.I'm appalled Syllabus published this pile of lies in their magazine which is"influencing decisions made across the higher ed enterprise". Were it notan editorial column it would be libel.

I am a Free Software developer. I have been helping the development ofthe Perl programming language, and miscellaneous others, for nearly sixyears now with a focus on Quality Assurance. I would like to countersome of Howard's most galling claims. So that I don't sink to Howard'slevel of unsubstantiated mud slinging, I'd like to counter some of hissmears with someone lacking in his article: Facts.

With my specialty in Perl QA, I will target Howard's most chaffing claim thatin order to use Free Software "we may have to give up project planning,quality control, coding standards, accountability, version control, andsupport" by providing direct counter examples in the development of Perl,the Free Software project with which I am most familiar.

Perl is an extremely popular programming language originally for Unixsystem administrators but exploded into prominence for web programmingduring the.com boom and has expanded into a powerful, Enterpriselevel general purpose language since then. Such corporations asMorgan Stanley, Ticketmaster, Pair Networks and Amazon.com use Perlextensively. It has been developed since 1987 originally by LarryWall [1] (a happily married father of four) and now by a talentedinternational collection of Perl users who donate their time to helpout. Perl is backed by The Perl Foundation [2], a 501c3 non-profitwhich has raised over $40,000 in the last year to help repay some ofthe most talented Perl developers for their volunteering time. Perlis built from 200,000 lines of C code and contains over 230,000 linesof documentation. It supports over 35 operating systems, many ofwhich you've probably never even heard of. [3] It comes as standard onnearly every Unix machine shipped today including Apple's OS X. Andyes, its all Free. [4]

Project planning is ultimately handled by Larry Wall who layed out thedesign and purpose of Perl years ago. His intentions are carried outby our development lead (known as the Pumpkin King) who hasresponsibility for a single major release of Perl. Development goalsfor each version are set and met. Older major revisions aremaintained by different Pumpkin Kings. Backwards compatibility isvigorously enforced both by our test suite and by individuals actingas a volunteer Backward Compatibility Police.

Quality control in Perl is provided by its extensive testing suitewhich, at last count, totals over 100,000 lines of code in 850individual files. The test suite is nearly as large as Perl itself.It is shipped with the source code of Perl and run as part of theinstallation process. The bleeding edge version of Perl is build andtested dozens of times a day [5]. We have an extensive bug trackingsystem not only for Perl [6] but for all those who write Perllibraries [7]. Finally, a team of volunteer testers ensure reportproblems in Perl libraries. [8]

Coding standards are layed out in several documents [9,10] andenforced by the small group of people who have access to commitchanges to Perl (the Pumpkin King and his assistants). Most changesare first discussed on the development list and often altered forstylistic reasons before committing. All changes are logged to amailing list [11] if you wish to systematicly review and makestylistic comments.

Version control is provided by Perforce [12] who generously makestheir commercial software free for use by Free Software projects. Apublicly browsable repository is available via the web [13]. Inaddition, all older versions of Perl and all libraries are archived[14].

As for accountability, you can join the Perl development list and readall the discussions, decisions, fighting, squabbling, mistakes, fixesand ponderings by the Perl development team. In fact, you can readthe last eight years of development team communications. [15] And youcan join right in!

A commercially supported and quality assured version of Perl can bebought from ActiveState [16] should you desire commercial support.

Perl is not an atypical Free Software project. PHP, Python, Apache,Linux, BSD, MySQL, PostgreSQL... just to name a few can all supportsimilar histories and support. Its a mature, long establisheddevelopment project and its Free, yet you can get commercial support.Eclipsing common commercial practices, its internal developerdiscussions are open to the public as are its bug list, versioncontrol system and development releases. How much more accountabilitydo you want?

Are there Free Software projects that don't have this level oforganization, maturity and accountability? Are there commercialprojects that don't? Yes, lots on both counts. First timeprogrammers eager to rush out and write some code adorn both thecommercial and non-commercial world. Free or commercial, it doesn'tmatter. Either your organized or you're not. To label all FreeSoftware as a bunch of disorganized teenagers writing codeindiscriminately is to display a lack of understanding of what reallyeffects software development. Something I would hope the manager oftechnology strategy and outreach at Princeton University would knowsomething about. The difference with Free Software isthe books are open. You can read the code, talk the to thedevelopers, see the bugs, check for yourself if the project has itsact together. You see the successes and the many, many failures.You can audit the whole system. With closed development commercial softwareyou just have to take their word on it that everything's hunky dory.

Finally I would like to address Howard's most base and childishcharge. His equating Free Software developers to "a smattering ofteenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators..."Shame on you. Shame on you to try link Free Software volunteers to acollection of malicious virus authors or say that they childrenirked becasue they can't work at Microsoft. Shame on your for belittlingtheir efforts. Shame on you for reducing an academic opinion column toschoolyard name-calling.

Yes, some of the developers are teenagers who are too young to work atRedmond. Some are happily married fathers and mothers. Some aregrey bearded old crufty Unix geeks. Some are even IBM and Sunemployees. Many have no credentials at all. Free Softwaredevelopment is largely a meritocracy. We don't care who you are aslong as you do good work. I myself am a 28 year old single male twofailed out of an Electrical and Computer Engineering program with noaccreditations, certifications or affiliations with any large softwarecompany. I write good code and that's all that matters. Male,female, young, old, fat, short, bad English, bad breath, we don'tcare. Just so long as you write good code and play well with others.And shouldn't that be all that matters?

I invite Howard to have a look at the people who create Free Software,as seen through the lens of Julian Cash [17] at the O'Reilly OpenSource Convention. [18] I invite him to come to the conference andmeet the people he's slandered. As an employee of PrincetonUniversity Howard should know that the best way to expel ignorance iseducation.

I apologize for the length of this letter, but I felt the falsecharacterizations in Howard's column needed a rebuttal backed up withevidence. I thank you, Mary, for reading and hope Syllabus will keep itscolumns in the realm of informed opinion.

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to
use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

My impression, reading the article, was that the author has a lot of experience with crappily managed Free Software. Which I would suggest is not uncommon in academic settings (at least, it was at the school I attended in the mid-90s). Beyond the lies in the article, I got a mild grin out of:

Another way to get free software is to have students develop our critical systems. We all know how clever students are and how being born in the computer age they have bypassed a million years of evolution to becom

I'm glad somebody still has the energy to write coherent, non-flame responses to this sort of nonsense.

I used to do it all of the time. Now, to be honest, I just can't be bothered. On the bad days I think this is because I have become lazy. On the good days I think it is because the argument has already been won in the world at large;-)